"This is just my, my opinion and my words. We owe a debt of gratitude for those people that went overseas. People that have given everything, and never came back home. That's what we feel like our dedication is, is to provide a service. Not just a service to do the funeral and the headstone, and mowing the grass. But you feel it inside, and you know where they come from. And it's, it's an ongoing feeling. It don’t, it don’t go away from you. It sticks with you the rest of your life, and it means something to you.
NCA provides the grounds to do the, for the burials. And they also provide the opening and closing of the graves. They provide the headstones. And also the perpetual care that is an ongoing process that you see here. The care of the grounds doesn’t end at the funeral.
And those people that come here, the family members to be, to see their loved one off, is a bond that sticks with you the rest of your life. Because, you've been in their shoes. You've been with the comrade that they are saying goodbye to. And that's, you know, that kind of gets to you.
It means to me that you can still be close. That you can still, that you can still do something for the family of those that have lost someone here.
There’s nothing here that I can see that’s left undone.
If we're mowing or weed eating or anything like that, and we see a stone that's sunk or out of alignment or needs to be tweaked a little bit, we go ahead and take time to do that.
To have rows of straight stones, whether you’re looking down them or diagonally. It reflects upon the beauty of the national cemetery.
It's important to me because it touches home. Coming to work for the VA means everything to those who work here. Because we like what we do. We don’t show up just to do some work and go home. There’s a certain amount of camaraderie that we have in common.
It's a nice place to work. This is a good place to start a good career.
We don’t take shortcuts. We take pride in what we do. We're deliberate in what we do. In other words, at 4:30 in the afternoon, when you get ready to go home, you stand back and look at what you did, and you take pride in it.
Video: Final scene is John walking through the cemetery reading veterans graves “Unknown US Soldier ….Unknown US Soldier …you know this place has been here since 1864 and we’re still taking care of these graves.”
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